Just like racial difference, whiteness is a social construct. The paradox of race and of whiteness is that white or nonwhite skin color means nothing in itself; rather, what matters is the social meaning that is ascribed to these differences in color. This essay examines the way whiteness has historically been constructed in both law and literature. Exploring the parallel between legal and literary histories, it refers to the literature of naturalism – Frank Norris’s The Octopus and Stephen Crane’s Maggie – as well as to the racial prerequisite cases, in which immigrants had to prove they were white and hence eligible for naturalization. In law as much as in literature, whiteness is far from homogenous, but instead seems to be eclipsed into infinite shades of whiteness. At the same time, in both literature and law, whiteness is not only linked to skin color, but to culture as well. In Crane’s novella, the cultural compatibility of the Irish is seen as dubious at best. Similarly, the Chinese cook in Norris’s novel is portrayed as culturally alien and hence as unassimilable. This essay proposes that the potential whiteness of immigrant groups is being contested in both the court of law and that of literature.

Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century epitomized the social transformation happening throughout the United States at the time: an industrial revolution; transformation of technology, architecture, and infrastructure; population growth fueled by immigration; and the rise of organized labor and the growth of socialism and anarchism. Novelists writing about Chicago responded to these changes. Breaking with the “genteel tradition” that persisted in William Dean Howells’s “teacup realism” and Henry James’s aestheticism, Chicago realists represented the city with fierce irony, bleak plotlines, and frank language. Realists such as Henry Blake Fuller employed a wealth of metonymy that would better represent the new social conditions; realists such as Frank Norris employed a coarse style and melodramatic subject-matter that rejected the refinement of East Coast fiction. However, although Chicago novelists hinted at the violence in the heart of the bourgeoisie as well as the poor, their realism remained genteel in its focus on a middle-class, male individual and its reluctance to narrate the social upheavals of immigration, organized labor, and political radicalism.

From the turn of the twentieth century forward, movie makers, fiction writers, and journalists have increasingly pushed into view bodies mangled by agricultural machinery, workers drowning in silos filled with grain, and lands laden with synthetic toxins. Farms have frequently appeared not only as ideal homesteads near picturesque villages but also as cogs in the brutality of corporate agribusiness, or as isolated and alien outposts struggling for economic survival in depopulated landscapes. The farm has even grown into a privileged setting for stories of supernatural horror bound to the rise of agriculture’s industrialization. Tangled with images of terror and mutilated bodies, Thomas Jefferson’s once idyllic “labor in the earth” now often takes place on a threatening, quasi-industrial, vast and lonely landscape of corn. Texts examined include Frank Norris' The Octopus, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House,” Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Stephen King’s “The Children of the Corn.”